


Let the Sand Fall (That's What an Hourglass is For)

by Fallowsthorn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Immortality, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-26
Updated: 2013-06-26
Packaged: 2017-12-16 06:58:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/859204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallowsthorn/pseuds/Fallowsthorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The lives of multiple characters, told through each of their nine deaths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. John Watson

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the Sherlock Kink Meme: http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/5564.html?thread=18936508#t18936508

**The First Death** is written off as a fluke. Infants are fragile, after all, and John Watson came early, and in the wrong position. There was too much blood on both sides of the equation, from mother and son, and the midwife was too busy trying to staunch Helen Watson's bleeding, trying to save the life of the only one she thought she could, to notice that far too many silent, invisible heartbeats went by before John Watson began to wail.

 

* * *

**The Second Death** is the one no one sees. No adult, that is. Harry Watson, at ten, thought herself much more mature than her seven-year-old brother. While her opinion is debatable, the fact of the matter is that a ten-year-old's palms can take a jump off a swing and a tumble to the ground far better than a seven-year-old's skull can.

Neither of them said anything to their father. They knew, somehow, that it was impossible, that when a person's head is split and red and gray spills onto the ground through broken shards of white, that person should not get up again five minutes later and proclaim that "That was fun! I wanna do it again!"

They also knew that no one would believe them. And so when George Watson came home to greet his children and ask them about their day, they answered simply, "It was fine." And he shook his head and mused that his children were growing up far too fast.

* * *

**The Third Death** is the first one John can remember. He was in high school, and, at fifteen, thought himself invincible, although he didn't know just how true that was. Harry had shown him just last week how to hook a paper clip into the lock and get into the school pool for a midnight swim, and had shown him how much better it was to swim in the dark. She told him it was better to go with a partner, for safety's sake, but he thought he'd be fine. He was, after all, a strong enough swimmer.

But that was when he could see, and this time it was pitch black, and easy enough to misjudge where the metal bar was. Easy enough to pull himself out of the water in one quick motion. Easy enough to hit his head on unforgiving metal, sharply enough to send him dazed and reeling back into the water. Easy enough to take in a breath, only thrashing to awareness when he realized that what he was breathing in was not air but water.

Harry figured out where he was, and dove in to get him, following the glint of his metal bracelet in the ghoulish cast of her torchlight cutting through the water. John's skin was bloated, and she had to pound him on the back to start the water pouring out of his mouth.

When he could see the glowing clock at the end of the pool, he informed her that he'd been drowned for an hour. He sounded scared, shaken and bewildered. She assured him that it would be alright, and she sounded steady, because she remembered the last time, and now she knew it wasn't a dream.

* * *

**The Fourth Death** is the first one that is truly someone else's fault. John was in college, young and hot-headed, and perhaps more than a little drunk, and hadn't thought to check with the large man about whether the alluring girl sitting next to him was available or not.

And medical degree or not, John knows that he should not have been able to survive the broken end of a bottle to the gut, much less arrive home after getting a ride from the suddenly sober man and his girlfriend to find that where he'd felt cutting and slicing and the burning sting of alcohol, there was nothing but unbroken skin.

Not even a scar remained.

* * *

**The Fifth Death** is when John had actually started to accept that he might not be normal. Or at least, not like everyone else. He had just finished his medical degree and was thinking about applying to be in the army. That didn't matter, though, not in this death. Who he was, what he'd done, what he was going to become, none of it mattered. All that mattered to the mugger who'd pushed a knife against his throat was the contents of his wallet. John had gone very still and spoken very softly and moved very slowly, and he'd had the pound notes in his hand when police sirens began to sound, faintly.

The mugger cursed and, before John could reassure him that there was no possible way the cars were coming for either of them, drew his hand, and with it the knife, hard across John's throat.

Time stood still, and for a moment their eyes met, both wide, both shocked, one pair scared and the other confused.

John was about to blink and tell the mugger that he must have missed, but then the mugger turned and ran like the hounds of Hell were after him, and the world went foggy, and the ground suddenly looked very comfortable. A voice whispered to John that he had better rest for a while, before his throat began to really hurt, and both the voice and the idea sounded so wonderful that John didn't even question why his throat would hurt before laying down on the suddenly red and sticky ground and letting blackness envelope him.

When he woke up, the first thing he did was puke. Then he checked the time, and saw that he'd been lying in a pool of his own blood for two days straight. Then he saw his wallet, which had landed outside of the pool. The entire thing, and the contents, were covered in blood from the initial gush that had followed the mugger's blade.

John trashed the wallet, burned the money, soaked the coins and cards in bleach and lived off Ramen for a month.

* * *

**The Sixth Death** is the first one that feels noble. It's also the first one that makes him feel guilty for having not stayed dead. He refuses to call it surviving. He'd been accepted into the army, and had put his knowledge of medicine to good use in the field. He'd been on a scouting mission with his unit – only there just in case. The just in case had turned out to be a good thing. They'd been ambushed by the enemy, hiding and unseen in the tall grass. John had seen a figure drop to the ground during their retreat back to cover – he didn't remember registering who it was, or even their gender. Hell, it could have been one of the people shooting at them, for all he saw.

But he had to try, even if it seemed crazy, because he had to. So he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled over to where the figure was writhing, its hands clenched over its belly.

He said, "I'm a doctor, let me help," and he wasn't quite sure it – she, a redhead, eyes like bullets and hair like blood – could hear him, but apparently something got through because she nodded and gripped the grass at her sides instead.

He hissed in concentration. Her abdomen was a mess of pink and red and camouflage, and whoever shot her was either a very good sadistic shot or a vaguely good average one, because the bullet tore all the way through her and her stomach acid was dissolving the rest of her.

She was in no shape to move, but there was nothing John could do to help her here, so he lifted the arm on her good side around his shoulders and prepared to stand up. Her eyes widened and she nodded again, more frantically, and wrapped her free hand around her waist. John added his own palm to the gaping hole in her side, and on a silent count of three, they stood, keeping as low to the ground as they can without overbalancing.

And then they went down again, as John felt a searing pain in his shoulder and lost control of his steps. He stared, shocked, at the woman, and she gave him a sad smile and a slow shake of her head.

Then he understood, and he pounded the sand with his fist because it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, dammit, that if he was going to live anyway, why couldn't he just get this girl to safety before his stupid body gave up on him!

And then the world faded to black around them, and the soldier with the eyes like bullets and the smile like a broken toy stood, and walked a few paces before turning to glance back at him. She looked up at a point in the darkness and asked, "Why can't he come with me?"

And a voice, a soft, wonderful voice, the voice he heard when his throat was cut, but clearer, and ringing like a crystal glass, answered,  _His place is not your own._

The woman's eyes widened. Her camouflage blurred, and turned into jeans and a jumper, a change that she didn't seem to notice. "Is he going to Hell?" And, then, quieter, smaller, frightened, "Am I?"

 _No, child,_ said the voice.  _That is not your concern. He will be all right. You must say good bye now._

The woman with the eyes like the sun on ice and the smile like a lover's touch walked back, and knelt by him. "I'm sorry," she said, and John wanted to say  _You have nothing to be sorry for, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I couldn't save you,_ but his mouth wouldn't move and his tongue would not obey him. He was stuck in that position, lying on his back, utterly exposed, pinned to the ground by one shoulder, helpless to talk or move or breathe.

The woman cocked her head to the side, an abruptly childlike movement. "You're hurt." She put her hand forward tentatively, and touched the place where blood still stained John's uniform, discoloring the white patch on his arm that said he was a healer. Where her fingers touched the wound, golden light appeared, except it wasn't light, and it was, because they weren't in darkness, and they were. The pain vanished, and John collapsed to ground that was suddenly a sandy plain in the middle of war-torn Afghanistan, blood-soaked and filled with gunfire and startling to senses that were inundated with too much information.

He looked down at his chest and saw a bloody hand holding a bullet. There was a neat hole in the fabric of John's uniform, right over his heart, and when he glanced over to his side, he saw the fallen woman looking at him with eyes like marbles and a smile like a wish that would never come true.

It was only when he had half-carried, half-dragged her body to shelter and radioed for help that he allowed himself to let his own eyes to roll back in his head in an exhausted, bewildered faint.

* * *

**The Seventh Death** is the first one that an adult sees, believes, and survives. He was tied to a chair with an over-sized crossbow pointed at him, sand pouring out of the counterweight and Sarah screaming behind her gag that he's telling the truth, he's John Watson, not Sherlock Holmes, can't you see sense?

It depressed John slightly that he had become fluent in Gagged Person. It also depressed him that he was very likely going to die (again), and that Sarah would see it (oops), and that she probably wouldn't get it (which made it okay, right?).

Sure enough, Sherlock showed up, which distracted the General, who forgot (sure she did) to move the crossbow. Sherlock couldn't get to him in time (because it all happened a bit too quickly for him to edge around the sides), and Sarah, for all her pleading, could do nothing to move the quarrel, or knock it out of its path (because, really, was she trying to move it with sound?), and John couldn't get out of the way at all (stupid chair tied to a heavy whatever it was), and so he was awarded the rather dubious honor of feeling a giant chunk of wood and steel embed itself in his solar plexus (because his luck was just that bloody brilliant).

As deaths go, it wasn't particularly painful (because he was out cold before his nerves got the chance to kick in), and the voice barely gave him an amused,  _Back again?_ before shoving him out into the world of the living.

Sherlock was holding the quarrel, his face ashen. Both the General and her minion were dead on the ground, with more bullet holes in them than strictly necessary to kill a person.

Sarah had been untied and was in the corner being violently sick. As such, she missed it when John took a heaving breath and convulsed involuntarily, signaling his return to life.

But Sherlock didn't. Sherlock jumped in shock (which John thought he'd never see) and dropped the quarrel, then narrowed his eyes (because he couldn't very well leave it alone, that would be too much to hope for) and helped John up.

John couldn't remember what they told Sarah, as she huddled in her bright orange shock blanket, but when they got back to the flat, John told Sherlock everything he knew, and let Sherlock draw some of his blood to test it (it wasn't like he'd find anything, would he?).

He did all this without Sherlock having to ask. He didn't want the awkwardness and nosiness that would entail, and figured that if he was going to want to know anyway, they might as well get it over with.

(He was wrong. Sherlock wouldn't have asked. Sherlock already mostly knew. But it saved them both the trouble of an argument, had John found Sherlock snooping among his things for data on his hypothesis, having assumed that the information would not be volunteered willingly.)

* * *

**The Eighth Death** is the first one he agrees to. It happened at a poolside, at midnight. His chest was lit with red dots, as was Sherlock's back. The gun was leveled at a jacket stocked with enough explosives to vaporize everything within ten yards.

Sherlock turned to him, met his eyes. "Promise me you'll live," he said.

John nodded, ignoring Moriarty's confusion. "I promise."

Sherlock pulled the trigger.

John woke a week later, screaming in pain.

Not all of it was because his body was still knitting back together.

* * *

**The Ninth Death** is a dying, and then a living, and then a death. Every night, he quietly loads his gun and flicks the safety off, holding the barrel in his mouth until he can hear Sherlock say, " _Promise me,"_ and himself agree. And then he quietly sets the unspent bullet on his nightstand, slips the gun into a drawer, and falls into a dreamless, timeless sleep.

And yet the words sound... off, more crystalline, less human, each time, and so he stops. One night, he simply doesn't go through his ritual. He leaves the gun in the drawer, and for the first time, he rolls the bullet in after it. He stops just surviving, and starts making good on his promise.

He applies for a job at the hospital. A real job, full time. He throws himself into his work, loving it, loving saving people, and he refuses to let each one he doesn't save become Sherlock. They are their own people, with their own families and personalities and quirks and ways of keeping their dignity when they have nothing else, and eventually John becomes one of them.

And suddenly he has a long, jagged scar running up the base of his skull, up to the top of his ear, almost, and he shows it to Harry when he doesn't know what it means, and she explains. And he contracts a persistent case of walking pneumonia that means he constantly coughs up what looks like water. And suddenly, there's a scar on his belly, and throat, and it's hard to move his left arm, and a circular scar the size of a coin (which is almost exactly in the center of the scar on his belly, but he doesn't tell anyone) shows up, and his skin itches like something's trying to get out when he sits too close to a fire.

And one day, he tries to get up out of his chair, and it doesn't work. And he thinks,  _Another one?_

 _The last one, child,_ says the voice, and it doesn't have a body attached to it any more than it did the other eight times, but now he can feel the voice in his bones, and he is enveloped not by darkness but by light.

 _I'm so tired,_ he says.

 _I know, child,_ the voice soothes.  _There is someone who has been waiting for you. It's been a very long time. He's very stubborn. I can't imagine how he stayed awake for this long._ Suddenly John is very alert. He's not sure whether it's the place or the information.

 _Sherlock?_ he asks.

 _See for yourself,_ the voice says, and then leaves John alone with the figure that is approaching.

"Sherlock?" he croaks, using his vocal cords this time, and when the figure resolves itself into a man with black hair and ash-coal eyes and a coat that swirls around him like a river, John pelts towards him, feeling more alive than he has in years.

He wraps arms around Sherlock's waist, and Sherlock does the same, murmuring in his hair, "You promised."

"I kept it," John says in a voice that is not choked with tears, he just happens to have a little bit of a cold, that's all, never mind that he didn't have one a few minutes ago.

When they separate, John looks around at the desolate nothingness. "What do we do now? Sleep?"

Sherlock just looks at him. "Sleep is boring. Besides, we're dead, we don't need to."

"You barely needed to anyway, you haven't changed at all," John retorts, then breaks into a grin. "God, I missed you."

"Don't say things like that, you'll get all sappy and I won't have any idea what to do," Sherlock tells him bluntly.

John stares at him, and Sherlock stares back. They get locked into a staring contest, before Sherlock blinks, slow and deliberately, like a cat.

"You're an army doctor, a very good one," Sherlock says, carefully, testing, waiting.

"Yes," John agrees, blinking himself. He's aware that this is going somewhere, and wishes he could remember exactly what it was.

"You've seen a lot of injuries then, a lot of violent deaths," Sherlock continues, and John recognizes the script they followed three lifetimes ago, when he could run with an immortal man.

And then he changes it, just slightly, enough so that Sherlock will know the answer is  _yes,_ but that it is in the here and now, and not the there and then. "Had a lot of violent deaths."

Sherlock's mouth quirks. "Seen a bit of trouble, too, I expect."

John nods, eyes glittering, playing the game. "Well, yes. Enough to last nine lifetimes. And then some."

Sherlock holds his arm out, and suddenly they are in their old flat, and Mrs. Hudson's daughter, who'd taken over when she died, is clattering about in the front room. The colors are washed out, incorporeal, although John supposes that's because they are, too. "Want to go cause some more?"

"Oh, God, yes," John says, and hooks onto his arm, and they start through the wall to give their new landlady the fright of her life.


	2. Sherlock Holmes

**The First Death** is the one nobody sees. Sherlock woke in the middle of the night, to see a huge monster crouching on his chest, sniffing his breath. Of course, at the young age of eighteen months, the cat was about as big as Sherlock himself, and when he tried to draw breath for a wail, the cat's weight overpowered his small lungs.

After a few minutes, the cat figured no more interesting smells were forthcoming, and quietly padded away to investigate the creaking noise at the other end of the house.

Sherlock didn't take another breath until sunrise. He learned that the only person he could trust to help him was himself. Not in so many words, and not that he remembered why, but the lesson, the marrow of it, that stayed.

* * *

**The Second Death** is the first deduction Sherlock ever made. He was four, and curious about how the world worked. He hadn't  _tried_  to build a tower so rickety that it swayed even under his thirty-pound weight. He hadn't  _tried_ to grab perhaps the slipperiest thing he could to steady himself again the top shelf of the pantry. And he certainly hadn't  _wanted_ to be sent tumbling backwards. And when he collided with the counter behind him at just the wrong angle, sending his head snapping forward and his neck shattering under the whiplash pressure, by then it was much too late to say anything about  _tried_ and  _wanted._

He died instantly. Mummy had gone out with friends for the day, so it was up to Sherlock, once he regained some semblance of consciousness, to excruciatingly haul his head and neck back to the proper angles and lay there, drifting in and out of wakefulness, waiting for his bones to fuse.

The next day, he looked up "broken neck" in Mummy's big medical dictionary. He learned that he shouldn't be alive.

* * *

**The Third Death** is the stupid, pointless one, so Sherlock doesn't count it. He was ten, and didn't want to eat grapes. Mycroft said, "They won't kill you!" so Sherlock ate one.

He choked on it, and it promptly killed him. He learned not to trust his brother.

* * *

**The Other Third Death**  is the first one that is really and truly Sherlock's fault. He was in high school, and was just getting the hang of making deductions quickly and precisely. He was of the opinion that it made him sound sophisticated. He didn't know that other people thought it made him sound like a git until year 10. The resident popular bully had singled him out to test, to push and see if he'd make a good punching bag. Said he'd heard about Sherlock's "know-it-all" skills and wanted to see how they worked.

Sherlock had given him a demonstration.

In retrospect, he decided as he spilled blood and intestines onto the shower room floor, it probably hadn't been such a great idea to tell a good quarter of the cafeteria that the teenager standing in front of him was currently high on marijuana, had been beaten by his mother the previous night, and was planning on passing the favor on to his girlfriend, seeing as it was a pattern they'd established.

However, the look on the bully's face when Sherlock marched into class the next day and gave him an appraising look that said,  _I know all your secrets,_ now, that was priceless.

He learned that being smarter than everyone else also makes you better than them.

* * *

**The Fourth Death**  is the one where he learns what a gunshot feels like. He'd just gotten out of college, and spent most of his time sitting around either shooting up on cocaine or riding the high from it.

One day his dealer showed up. Sherlock had racked up a large debt with him. As Sherlock tried to explain that if he were dead, he wouldn't be able to pay, the dealer calmly pulled out a gun, screwed a silencer on it, and shot Sherlock in the heart.

In the resounding silence after the bang and Sherlock's moaning yell, the dealer called, "Don't worry, he just dropped a dictionary on his foot, everything's okay!"

When Sherlock woke up, he found a small vial of the drug with a note under it saying, taunting,  _Your last hit ever. Make it stretch, stiffie._

He learned that people don't always listen to what is obviously common sense.

* * *

**The Fifth Death** comes immediately after the fourth. Sherlock had figured there wasn't much he could do with himself, and shot up again. This proved to be a mistake, as his heart really wasn't built for that much exertion.

That time, although he recognized it as a likely hallucination, Sherlock could distinctly hear a crystal, beautiful voice sigh, and say,  _Oh, child, you idiot. Get clean and do something with the rest of your time._

When he woke up (again), there was a man standing over him, who looked almost as shocked as Sherlock felt. The man's name was DI Lestrade, and after jailing Sherlock for a short time, during which Sherlock proved three men innocent and one man guilty (even though the last didn't know what for, having been still drunk at the time), he told Sherlock to get out, he had enough paperwork to do, and yes, fine, he would call if he had any really interesting serial killers or something for Sherlock to work on.

He rolled his eyes as he said it, though, so Sherlock texted him at least once a day until Lestrade finally gave him a case.

He learned his body only mattered because it housed his brain.

* * *

**The Sixth Death** is the painful one. Not that the rest weren't painful, but unfortunately, really interesting serial killers also tend to be really sadistic ones.

It was the first case Sherlock took that was also something the police were looking into, and something they allowed him on. He had run into the murderer's hideout without backup, believing, somehow, that the man would see that he had all of the answers and knew how and why he'd done it, and would just give up.

That turned out to be a really stupid assumption. Apparently, in his whirling of answers and running and deductions, he had not counted upon the solution the murderer had: dead men can't talk.

But tortured ones can scream.

It took Sherlock three hours to die, and thirty-eight to come back to life. He learned that when you've been through that much pain, you have nothing, not your voice and not your breath and not your pride.

* * *

**The Seventh Death** is the first one that anyone truly cares about, and understands. Not that anyone knows, per se, but they'd care if they did. He was investigating a locked apartment, with John pressing the buzzer insistently and the murderer still inside.

It took him a few minutes to be overcome by the assassin, and he maintained (or he would, if anyone asked him) that he wouldn't have died if he hadn't been taken by surprise.

The murderer left quickly, and his muscles were stronger, so it only took a couple seconds for him to revive.

Just long enough to recognize a dark, cool landscape of nothingness, and to learn that perhaps he wouldn't have died if he'd let John in to help him, either.

* * *

**The Eighth Death** is the first one that matters, and the last one that ever will. It happens at a poolside, at midnight. His back is lit up like a Christmas tree with red dots, as is John's chest. The gun is leveled at a jacket stocked with enough explosives to vaporize everything within ten yards. It's shaking, although Sherlock is fairly sure that Moriarty, from where he stands, can't tell. He glances over at John, and it occurs to him that he's finally dying  _for_ someone, instead of  _because_ of them.

It's a nice feeling, and it may very well be the last chance to say it, so Sherlock, ignoring Moriarty for a minute, calls to John, "Promise me you'll live."

And John says, "I promise," so Sherlock pulls the trigger.

The world explodes into light that should fade but doesn't. When Sherlock can open his eyes again, he sees John lying unconscious on the ground next to him. He looks faintly ghost-like, and when Sherlock tries to touch him, his hand falls through John's arm, leaving a trail of golden not-light.

_Will he come back?_ he asks, although he's not quite sure to whom.

A voice answers, crystal and crystal clear.  _To life? Yes, child._

Sherlock pauses before asking his next question, feeling a sense of what the answer will be. So he turns the question into a statement.  _I won't._

_No, child._

_Why?_ Sherlock asks, feeling irrationally betrayed.  _Why him and not me?_

_It is not his time yet,_ the voice says simply.  _It is yours. Now, you must make your goodbyes. He needs to go back, and you need to rest._

Sherlock ignores the voice and turns to John, who is still not breathing but looks better than he did a few moments ago. "Don't you dare die," he tells John, feeling slightly foolish. The voice doesn't say anything, though, so he ignores that. "I don't want to see you for another sixty years." Or something. Sherlock is fully aware of how completely ridiculous this is, even with no one to call him out on it. He shuts up and just sits there, watching John's body become more and more translucent, until he is gone.

The voice must have left, though, because when Sherlock looks around for what to do, there is nothing prompting him.

Suddenly, tiredness creeps into his bones. It feels like the crash he gets after a case has been finished, when there is nothing to do, and all his body wants is sleep, sleep, sleep.

But sleep is boring, so boring, and he has to stay awake to see John. So Sherlock wraps the promise around himself like a cloak, and he makes himself comfortable.

And this time, he learns to wait.


	3. Jim Moriarty

**The First Death** is the only one that isn't his fault in the slightest. He was three, and a day at the park seemed like the perfect thing to his mother. It wasn't anyone's fault, certainly not his, that the shiny "worm" in the grass that seemed so entrancing was not, in fact, a simple garden snake.

When Jim Moriarty sat back up with a coughing gasp, his mother screamed, louder than she had when he died.

* * *

**The Second Death** is the one that he has likely shared with the same man who first discovered fire. He was nine, and had just gotten tall enough to scrabble over the top of the counter and turn on the flickering, dancing blue flames of the gas stove. They were beautiful, entrancing, bewitching, and they captured his sight as well as the crystal wind-chimes in the window. And he reached out to take hold of the flames, because how could anything so beautiful hurt him?

He should have remembered the snake, glittering with jade-stone scales and hidden teeth. In the manner of a small child, he at first did not understand what exactly was causing the searing pain in his hand, and clutched it close to his chest to get it away. But he could not smother the fire in time, and it spread across his body, kissing his skin and boiling his blood and cooking his body with its branding touch.

It was five hours before the flames finally died. It was six before Jim's mother made it home from work. Unlike him, she remembered the first time, and turned off the stove calmly (if shakily) before dousing him thoroughly with water and settling, cross-legged, on the soot-darkened stone of the kitchen floor.

Her vigil last through the night, the next day, and half the next night. Jim woke up with raw and tender skin and a blinding sensitivity to light, which wouldn't disappear for another few days. He also woke up with a new appreciation for fire, for how it could burn and twist and dance to his matchstick tune.

The first thing he saw was his mother. She looked at him carefully and nodded once. He nodded back, strong and sure. They never spoke of his death again.

* * *

**The Third Death** is also his first taste of control, the first taste of what it was like to truly hurt another person. He was sixteen, and learning to drive. Amazingly, when you're learning to drive, it's incredibly easy to pretend to lose control of the car and slam both yourself and your driving instructor into the nearest tree.

Granted, he hadn't entirely expected the fireball that followed, as the gas tank ruptured and ignited, but it added to the thrill of the thing, and it didn't kill him, anyway.

No, what killed him was the shard of windshield glass that sliced his throat almost as perfectly as a knife would have done.

The fireball killed the instructor.

Jim grinned giddily, once he'd revived, until they pulled him out of the car, which was when he put his two semesters of Drama to good use. He was proud of his performance for the officers – even managed to squeeze out a few tears (and really, whether it was from sorrow or smoke, no one had to know).

But... after the policemen and the paramedics had left off with the questions, when he was sitting on the back of the open ambulance with an orange blanket around his shoulders, he saw his mother. And – and this is the part that confused the authorities to no end, because when their eyes connected, he did not run into her embrace. And she did not come any closer. Instead, she smiled, brittle and bitter, and turned away.

He found his own way home.

Then, a year later, he found his own home, too.

* * *

**The Fourth Death** is the lying one, the first one that uses subterfuge on someone else's part. He'd begun fighting for money on the streets – not boxing or wrestling, but fighting, hard and fast and dirty, in rings drawn in the dirt where cheating was encouraged and death was cheap. Fighters were practically expected to palm blades, throw dust in each other's eyes, and use any means they could to get the upper hand.

Jim usually did well to remember this, and used his small size and agility to dodge out of the way and trip up his larger opponents, sometimes also using their own concealed (or not) weapons against them.

But it's hard to duck and dodge and weave out of the way when your enemy can do the same thing, and by the time Jim realized it had been too long since he'd known what it felt like to be hunted and not hunter, the knife was slipping between his ribs and into his stomach.

The next ten minutes were spent in exquisite, unmoving agony, as Jim's stomach acid slowly dissolved the rest of him. He died alone.

When he woke up, he was still alone. The only difference was that it was nighttime, he was starving, and someone had come back and stolen the knife.

* * *

**The Fifth Death** is the one where he tries to experiment. He set up a puzzle, such a simple thing, but he masked his face and voice and told the poor, poor officers that if they did not solve it in time, a hundred thousand people would die.

They solved it, of course, it was practically a child's game, but, oh, Jim loved the expressions on their faces when they rushed into the room where he was and were forced to watch him shoot himself in the head.

He'd have burned, but it would have taken too long, and what a disappointing ending to his tale it would have been, had they managed to keep him alive through all that. Jim didn't think he could stand being imprisoned.

He saw a blackness that time, cold and dark and stretching on forever, and a voice cold enough to match, a voice that was contempt and disgust and utter, helpless, ice-white-hot fury, said,  _I want to stop you._

 _You can't,_ taunted Jim, and took his first breath in three hours. He grabbed his gun and vanished out of the window before the startled policeman could even draw breath to yell.

* * *

**The Sixth Death** is because he was bored. Some people, when they are bored, read a book. Some play a game. Some play the odds. Jim played with fire.

It was beautiful. He still thought that now, a sentiment reinforced instead of weakened by his encounters with the element. It seemed unimaginable, almost, to him, that anyone could fear this wonderful creature he held in the palm of his hand. It ate and ate and took and took and it gave light and heat from its taking. And it  _burned,_ oh, it burned like the heart of a star, the most glorious death of them all, to implode into bright fire, carved out hollow and raw and dry like a dragon's skull.

And so he touched the flames to his fingers and his throat and his lips and his eyes, and he became the dancing man, wreathed in beautiful flames, until the fire burned down his neurons and the bridges between his thoughts, and he died.

* * *

**The Seventh Death** is the profitable one. Jim had put himself on the criminal market as the immortal man, and while no one believed him, he acted so convincingly that he was finally hired.

His employer shot him in the heart as a test of his claim. When he stood back up after a few minutes, he was given the job. He lived like a king by his second month.

* * *

**The Eighth Death** came because being an immortal man was boring. Jim had made his way to the top, and he forged the title of "Consulting Criminal" for himself. Unofficially (which translated roughly to "behind his back") he was known as the Fix-It Man. Jim, my lover is cheating on me, please fix it for me. Jim, my boss is an idiot and I want a raise, can't you fix it for me? And please, oh, please, Jim, I've killed someone and I don't know what to  _do,_ please won't you fix it for me?

But a Fix-It Man makes a lot of enemies, and a lot of powerful ones, too. Jim's throat was slit almost as soon as his new occupation became known to the criminal underworld.

It took him about five hours to wake up from that. The darkness pushed its icy spindle-fingers into the wound in his throat, and when Jim revived, he wasn't very surprised to find frost creeping along his throat, masking a distorted line.

When the frost evaporated, melted by Jim's suddenly resuming body heat, the scar disappeared with it.

* * *

**The Ninth Death** is the one that surprises him. The man with the beautiful,  _interesting_ mind wouldn't shoot. Jim knew that as well as he knew what he himself would and wouldn't do, because if there was anything he cared about, he would never destroy that one thing.

He is spared a moment of abject confusion as Sherlock Holmes turns to his companion and says, "Promise me you'll live."

The confusion begins to resolve itself into panic when the blond man promises. But how can he promise anything, he'll die if Sherlock pulls that trigger, they all will-

Oh. No, it couldn't be. Could it...?

Were there others like him, immortal, unable to stay dead?

The thought is halted, replaced by,  _I guess we'll find out,_ when Sherlock nods, turns back to the jacket, and pulls the trigger.

Jim Moriarty dies by fire, burning, cleansing, pure. The fire never falls from his vision, and he is surrounded by a cold light and a hard voice that says simply, cruelly without trying,  _You have no one to whom you can say goodbye. You are unwanted, in life and death. Now, sleep. And never wake. You are no child of mine._

And, like a bullet to the back of his brain, Jim's eyes roll up in his head, and he is gone.

The voice waits until Jim's body drifts away like dust in the wind, tiny motes seeding into the fog-covered, white-clear-anycolor ground, before it speaks again, although no one is there to hear it. Its tone is soft, subdued and wistful, and, for a moment, it contains the burden of all the sadness it has born witness to.

 _I wish there was justice here,_ it says, and then quietly summons its strength and departs, leaving the light to fade.


End file.
